At TED2012, Ramirez talked about a crisis in education: The problems of our time require creativity and nonlinear thinking, and in the United States, students simply aren’t being prepared to come up with the solutions we’ll need. Now, in her new TED Book Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Ramirez shares what she sees as the best way to inspire new learners — a commitment to improving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. In the book, Ramirez takes a hard look at the cultural and historical reasons why STEM education has declined in the United States over the last few decades. Her plea: We need to bring it back.

Curious to hear more about what can be done to make STEM fun again, we asked Ramirez a few questions about her new TED Book.

What inspired you to write this book now?

There is a line in the poem On Crime and Punishment by Khalil Gibran that says, “He falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.”

As a scientist who has walked along this bumpy STEM pipeline, I wanted to leave clues and a map on how to navigate it. Save Our Science is the map. It’s not only for those within the pipeline, but also for the whole STEM ecosystem. Everyone feels helpless in this education crisis. Save Our Science is a manifesto to recharge and empower everyone. In it, I am acting as an on-the-ground Secretary of Education, attempting to help all Americans feel empowered to make change. This book spells out how we — teachers, parents, citizens, politicians — can use all the pieces that are working and arrange them in a way that will make the US a leader in STEM education again. It includes actions that individuals and groups can take to get the education system back on track.

Why is STEM education so vital?

First, most of the jobs of the 21st century will require people to be comfortable with science and math — not only the content and information, but the mindset that comes from these fields, such as trial-and-error and the skill of asking good questions.

Second, all the focus on testing is not allowing children to be children. That is, there are few opportunities for kids to explore something inspired by their curiosity, and few chances to get their hands dirty. Some might say that American childhood is under attack and with it all the key human development steps needed to make whole and healthy adults. STEM is like a training camp for key skills like encouraging curiosity and patience, and making friends with failure.

It has been shown that the ability to self-regulate — in other words, patience — is a better marker for success than IQ. There’s the famous marshmallow experiment, where children are given a marshmallow that they can eat now, or they’d get two if they wait 15 minutes. It was found that those who waited (less than 30% of them) actually did better in school. In this microwave era, STEM teaches children patience; you can’t rush an experiment. For example, try to quickly make rock candy from sugary water. You can’t! It takes time and requires patience. But it is so worth it! Learning to wait is a muscle that is lacking but important for human development. STEM provides human skills and virtues that will make our children successful down the road.

What key changes can we all make to improve STEM education?

Save Our Science suggests action items everyone can do to make STEM more fun and engaging. It could be a shop owner installing a 3D printer; or a mechanic having bike-repair nights in the neighborhood; or restaurants showing the chemistry of cooking. Parents can take stuff apart with their kids and learn together how things work. Show science videos at malls, in movie previews and at the dentist’s office. Of course, policymakers could learn more about what really works from other countries. The bottom line is, if we lather engaging STEM opportunities everywhere, we are going to change the cultural thinking about science.

I’ve seen it in my own town. I was having carpets cleaned in my home for Thanksgiving. The cleaning guy immediately recognized me from my science videos that play on the local cable channel in town. Our conversation moved from chitchat about the weather to an intense discussion of science. He talked about what he learned on the video, and then we started actually coming up with ideas for another video. He emphatically made suggestions. But that is not the point; the point is that he got it. He got that science was for him, and he could demand more, inspired by his curiosity. Science was part of his language now, and we were having a real conversation about real issues. Making science accessible and engaging is the first step to individual ownership of the concepts, and is the first step to making real change in STEM education.

How do you personally make STEM education more fun?

I am a STEM evangelist and try to make it fun in a number of ways. If I am at a cocktail party, I’m that person who will pull out a party trick. In my case, it is a small piece of memory wire that I store my wallet. This material changes its shape when you heat it with a match. If you want to see adults show childlike enthusiasm, this wire does it every time. After I show the wire demo, then I wait. Some people will be hooked and will ask what is going on. I’ll make analogies between atoms to members of a marching band, where each individual makes a small change, but the whole is a pronounced change. You can see this wire in action in this small TED-Ed video here.

As for younger people, at Yale I created a science lecture series for kids called Science Saturdays. Here, children get to learn about science from experts in an age-appropriate but not-dumbed-down way.

For a broader reach, I created a series of short science videos call Material Marvels, which have been seen all over the globe. I try to make science appealing with outlandish demonstrations (that often need a blowtorch), or make silly analogies — like that solar cells are sandwiches of silicon. These videos are playing on local television in my town, and I am surprised by their impact. When I go to the barbershop, gas station, or even at church, occasionally someone will come up to me to say they watched these videos. One woman recently said to me, “Hey, I saw you on TV doing science. I loved it, not because I know you, but because you made it fun. And I am an English major!” That is a huge testimonial to the impact of making science enjoyable and putting it where folks have access to it. People will come if you build it, and bring science to them in a way that is palatable.

In my classroom, I do some of the same outlandish demonstrations, but I also add lots of group discovery. Students learn better from their peers, so I’ll start a lesson and have an in-class assignment that they will do together. This is a less threatening approach for learning and, I’ve been told by my students, is fun.

Also, I’m an author. Right now I’m writing a book about American football through a science lens, called Newton’s Football, for Random House. With my collaborator, Allen St. John, we are using football as a model to describe the hot topics in science like chaos theory, the physics of football helmets, concussions, and other nuggets in a fun, big-think, non-preachy way. I think football fans will like a new way to look at the game, and non-football fans will gain a new point of entry to the game.

All in all, my joy is learning new things and translating what I’ve learned so that other people understand it too. In essence, I am acting as a science conduit and translate science so that it seems relevant to everyone. That is my mission, anyway.

Save Our Science is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

In Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Yale professor Ainissa Ramirez makes an impassioned call for a recommitment to improve science, technology, engineering and math education — often referred to as STEM — in our schools and throughout our society. She describes what habits we need to change to make STEM fun again, as well as a plan for how to increase every child’s participation in these disciplines.

Ramirez notes: “The artist Pablo Picasso once said that all children are born artists and that the trick is to stay that way as an adult. I believe that all children have an inner scientist within them, and we need to get them in touch with their inner scientist again.”

Save Our Science is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

Ramirez is no stranger to TED. At TED2012, she gave a powerful plea for us to rethink STEM education. Pointing out that we are quickly running out of rare earth minerals, essential for almost all of our technology, Ramirez believes that it will take major ingenuity to create a way to recycle these precious materials. Are we as a society prepared? Could this be a Sputnik moment for education? Read all about her talk » 

Ramirez was also the educator behind the TED-Ed lesson “Magical metals, how shape memory alloys work,” which used slices of bologna to bring walking, talking atoms to life. Watch the fascinating lesson below.

In the TED-Ed lesson “Magical metals, how shape memory alloys work,” animator Andy London had a creative idea for how to bring a science lesson from Ainissa Ramirez to life — by putting faces and matchstick limbs on bologna to create walking, talking atoms. This materials science lesson teaches that, in certain metals, atoms are able to rearrange themselves like a marching band into specific formations in different states. This property has proved very useful in surgery and robotics, as well as in architecture. (Watch Doris Kim Sung’s TED Talk, “Metal that breathes.)

Below, a few questions with London about how his deli meat animation came to be. 

So how did you land on using bologna as atoms in your TED-Ed lesson? 

Well I went to a Family Dollar store and obsessively looked through candy–Reese’s, Smarties, Skittles, etc. Everything was too small or just didn’t work as atoms. So we went to the frozen food section and found bologna. It was big enough and plain enough!

I actually ate the bologna afterwards. Everybody got mad at me because everyone thought I’d get sick from it since it was from the dollar store.

It seems like you use a lot of different materials throughout your animations. How do you create this style?

I walk around with my iPhone, taking photos throughout the day. When I drop my son off at daycare, when I teach, when I’m walking on the street — I get texture from things like old fire alarm boxes, whatever I see. After capturing these materials, I think about setting a scene with them.

I really like to capture food. For example, I like to pitch people as pancakes and bagels — bread in particular is a simple enough shape and the texture is mild enough (as in, it’s not so busy) that it lends itself well to bodies, etc. 

We’ve watched the TED-Ed lesson a few times now, and we have to ask: What are the weirdest things in it that we may not even have noticed?

Well, there’s a chicken bone somewhere in the animation. And the rocket ship in the beginning of the lesson is a telephone poll that had duct tape on it.

This post originally ran on the newly launched TED-Ed blog. Check in there for regular segments like “Meet the Educator.”

And to read more about Andy London, head to LondonSquared.net. London and his wife, Carolyn, are known for their 2004 short film “Backbrace,” that won Best Animation at the New York Television Festival and honorable mentions at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and the Woodstock Film Festival. Stay tuned for a new TED-Ed video from them in the next few weeks.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone’s attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to explain why this matters. A regular smartphone (what fits in the palm of the hand was the size of a washing machine 30 years ago) contains significant materials and technologies. And yet the average smartphone contains 64 elements from the periodic table, many of which are rare earth elements, the “secret sauce” of most technology. There’s a problem: we’re running out of them. And rare earth elements are not significant simply because of their contribution to fancy gadgetry, but also because they will be critical to the Energy 2.0/post-oil movement. The Prius has 20 pounds of rare earth elements in its battery alone, and with all the Prii out there, we’ll need more of these materials, not less.

Catching hold of a phrase that leaders have loved to bandy about in recent years, Ramirez continues: we “shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste.” Not only do we face a short-term challenge to figure out how to recycle these materials, but we need to figure out ways to produce innovative alternatives to them. That, she argues, poses no less than a way to rethink STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] education. “This is our Sputnik moment.”

What she proposes is a new way to recast science education from being about memorizing facts, “a trivial pursuit,” to being about problem-solving and thinking for oneself. We need to move away from focusing on tests to showing kids that it’s ok to learn or to take risks. “Children need to explore and to discover. This is how you innovate; you fail your way to your answer. Scientists fail all the time; we just brand it differently. We call it ‘data.’”

Finally, Ramirez calls for more science mentors who can nurture this experimental mindset in teachers. She mentions her supportive parents, her “science geek” teacher, and the impact of watching the television show 3-2-1 Contact in her youth. She describes the power of seeing an African American scientist presenter. “That was when I realized being black and being a scientist weren’t separate, they were linked,” she says. “I shouldn’t be one of the lone scientists of color in my corner of the world. It should be possible for any inner city girl to be a scientist if she wants. We need to remove as many barriers as possible.”

So much so that she concludes by calling for recording artists to write songs about science. “Instead of ‘she blinded me with science,’ it should be ‘she helped me see with science. She’s a biomedical engineer.’” Ramirez says, to laughter. “All kids have an inner scientist. We must nurture it.”